“The truth, in my opinion, is also damaged.” Carlos Mazón is like one of those kamikaze drivers who drives in the wrong direction and believes that those who break the code are the ones who are coming in his face. The president of the Generalitat Valenciana went so far as to affirm this Friday that the decision to send the massive alert at 8:11 p.m. on October 29, when hundreds of citizens were already trapped, was “correct.” And Mazón, in his first appearance in the Valencian Courts after the catastrophic DANA, trusted his own lies. The president repeated in the parliamentary seat the refrain of falsehoods and omissions that he has been chaining since the “unprecedented hydrological revolution”, according to the expression repeated ad nauseam, devastated the regions of l’Horta Sud and Utiel-Requena, leaving more of 200 deaths.
The head of the Consell blamed everyone (even the “prevention system”) except himself in singular. Mazón attacked, at length, against the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation (despite the 62 notices that the CHJ sent to the Generalitat while the president extended his famous lunch on the day of the proceedings) and against some of the Emergency protocols that he Just two years ago he said they were “clearly clear.”
In one of the responses, already in the afternoon, he assured: “I do not hide the errors of the Generalitat, I recognize them and assume them and I apologize for them.” And period. That was the closest thing to an assumption of responsibilities, not even their own, but regional ones. Of course, the half-assumption was pronounced after several hours attacking the central Government and, singularly, the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation.
The president carried a huge stack of papers with his speech. Thus, he detailed an interested chronology, with more than obvious falsehoods, that made an enormous triple time jump over the five hours that passed since he left the Palau de la Generalitat late in the morning to go to a meal with a journalist until was operational again.
A long ellipsis allowed him to avoid the detail of a key time slot in the response to the catastrophe: “I kept my agenda fully aware of how the situation was and knowing that the Minister of Justice and Interior, together with her team, had already traveled to some of the areas affected by the flood of the [río] Magro and that he was in contact with the Government Delegation.”
“However,” he added, “when I was warned that the situation at the Forata dam was getting worse, I went to the Emergency Coordination Center where the Cecopi was established and working. [Centro de Coordinación Operativa Integrado]”.
The president only provided a single piece of news about his late trip: “The trip was not easy. The bad weather, as is normal in these situations, produced heavy traffic and lengthened the journey until I arrived [al Centro de Coordinación de Emergencias de] l’Eliana with Cecopi working at full capacity and where it was not necessary for anyone to update me nor did I delay, not even for a second, the tasks that were being carried out.”
The late sending of the massive alert to mobile phones—at 8:11 p.m.—was a “correct decision” by the “emergency management,” he stated without breaking a sweat. What’s more, in the parallel reality in which Mazón operates, such a decision (or negligence, according to the opposition) was an “example that the coordination of administrations did work.” It is a system (Es-Alert) whose delivery corresponds to the autonomous community (and not to the “administrations” in general). In fact, the day after the tragedy, two more alerts were sent, without major difficulties.
Like in the 11M or in the Valencia Metro
His intervention was inevitably reminiscent of the lies that Eduardo Zaplana (his political mentor sentenced to more than a decade in prison for corruption) vented in response to the 11M attack when he was spokesperson for the PP in the Congress of Deputies. Or to the management of the Valencia Metro accident in 2006. The socialist trustee, José Muñoz, told him: “We remember the metro accident again, his entire theory is based on the fact that it was an inevitable tragedy.” For his part, with the fan plugged in at maximum power, the popular spokesperson, Juan Francisco Pérez Llorca, came to shoot against the “environmental fundamentalism of the extreme left.”
The head of the Consell did not even allude in his initial speech of two and a half hours, nor in the subsequent responses, to the ‘riuà’ of Valencia in 1957, which in the collective memory of the city refers to a disaster with an unknown number of disappeared and a management by the Franco authorities that outraged even the native right. In València there are still shops and bars that have a brand with the legend “this is where the riuà arrived”. On the contrary, Carlos Mazón did give as an example of the “only precedent” for the DANA of 2024 the flood that devastated Terrassa, Rubí and Sabadell in 1962, with “400 fatalities.”
The speech that had been prepared for him contained statements like this: “As you know, the first response to an emergency, as it cannot be otherwise, is the rescue of people and care for possible victims.” The president thus ignored prevention and prior warning to the population that a catastrophe was approaching. Mazón hid behind the fact that the alert was sent when he was informed that there was a risk of the Forata dam overflowing. The Generalitat Valenciana wanted to avoid an “apocalyptic risk” by sending the alert, according to Mazón. Below that risk threshold, two regions were completely devastated.
Carlos Mazón’s parliamentary package also included striking concepts such as “renaissance” or the often mentioned “hydrological revolution.” “We have learned from what did not work well during the first hours and we have corrected it,” said the president, who specified in passing that the learning affected “politicians and technicians.” The unexpected reference to the technicians was a warning to sailors in general.
In the reply, at times, he reproduced the arguments prepared for the PP charges (published by elDiario.es on November 7), especially in his allusions to the Valencian Emergency Unit (UVE). Overall, there was little originality on the factual reporting front.
Carlos Mazón’s team in the Presidency (the regional secretaries José Manuel Cuenca, Cayetano García Ramírez and Santiago Lumbreras) followed, apparently satisfied, the intervention of the head of the Consell. This is the president’s ‘politburo’, without any experience in disaster management, which has accompanied Mazón in the most complicated moments. In the groups of smokers in the garden of the autonomous chamber, some PP officials and deputies surrounded and hugged the members of the ‘politburo’.
Salomé Pradas, one of the main protagonists of the disastrous management, gave the image of an archaeological relic. The Minister of Justice and the Interior remained in her seat like a kind of political ‘zombie’ that no one approached to avoid possible contagion. With a distraught face and dark funeral attire, Pradas was hieratic and with a practically absent look throughout the day. In another seat of the members of the Consell, Nuria Montes kept her hands clasped during much of Carlos Mazón’s intervention, as if wanting to avoid picking up her mobile phone and tweeting. another outrage.
The general tone of the clothing of the parliamentary bench was dark, typical of a collective funeral. The popular ones applauded at the end of the first speech of their leader. However, after the intervention of the next spokesperson, José María Llanos, from Vox, his parliamentary group avoided applauding, as a sign of the exceptional nature of the plenary session. Compromís did not applaud its trustee, Joan Baldoví, either. And the PSPV-PSOE did the same after the intervention of José Muñoz.
It was not a day for applause: every time a speaking session ended, the chamber fell into an unusual silence in a parliamentary forum. However, after Mazón’s last intervention, late in the afternoon, the popular group reiterated its applause. Some discreet clapping, without the usual enthusiasm under normal conditions.
The president, in his line, did not respond to any question from the numerous media outlets deployed in the regional Parliament. And there are not a few outstanding questions and in his speech he also assured that he is not hiding from the media, despite the fact that he has only given interviews to related channels and radio stations and that the only press conference with questions was inevitable as it was an appearance with the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, on November 1. The president justified his information opacity—traced to the Metro accident in 2006—in the supposed need not to waste “not a single minute” in denying “hoaxes.” “It would have been immoral to spend time debunking hoaxes, I didn’t spend a single minute on that,” he added.
A deleted tweet
Although the ones from the morning before DANA are for hoaxes. The Vox spokesperson reminded Mazón of his untimely intervention at 1:00 p.m. on the tragic Tuesday, October 29, when he assured (in a tweet with the video later deleted) that the storm was already over. José María Llanos told him that “just like a fire, it is not said to be completely extinguished until three or four days have passed.” “That’s from the first year of Emergencies,” he snapped at her like a knife.
At this point, the president already didn’t care about everything. The new battle is that of the story. Carlos Mazón is already in the full reconstruction phase, as he said, thanks to the remodeling of the Consell. Its public image and credibility have been seriously damaged, as have the areas affected by DANA. His reliability has been flatly questioned even by his former Vox partners. In Valencia, very broad layers of the population trust a street gang more than their ‘honorable’ president of the Generalitat.
The entry and exit of Carlos Mazón from the regional chamber was almost clandestine, with an extensive police force. His few appearances in public spaces are not exactly peaceful. Despite this, his speech was on a renewed level and was full of references to reconstruction, “mutual support”, “empathy”, “solidarity” and a long etcetera of chatter about the “renaissance”. of the areas destroyed by DANA.
Compromís spokesperson, Joan Baldoví, snapped: “If you were not able to get to the Emergency Center when it was time, how are you going to be able to lead the reconstruction?”
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